final terminus, the newly built city of Elizabethville,[146] where a few Afrikaner families had settled. The jungles of the Congo made him feel claustrophobic – the trees were so dense that he could see no further than a few metres at a time and in the thick growth he had no hope of determining his direction. Here, in this wilderness, the possibility of getting lost was a real threat. To Malan, such a place, infested with tropical diseases and tsetse flies, was no place for an Afrikaner. He was hardly impressed with the Afrikaners who had wandered so far to the north.[147]
These Afrikaners were a different breed. They were always trekking, not for any particular reason, but because it had become a religion to them. To Malan, it was a perversion of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination – the belief that whatever happens is God’s will. They justified their nomadic lifestyle by claiming that they were following the Spirit’s call into the interior. Malan was sceptical as to whether this ‘Spirit’ originated from God. The Afrikaners of the Congo did not fill him with any romantic notions harking back to the times of the original Voortrekkers. Trekking taken to such an extreme was nothing but detrimental, Malan wrote:
Here it is certainly not always easy to distinguish between the spirit and the flesh. This at least is certain, that the trekker often suffers great, almost irreparable damage to his most elevated interests. They live completely beyond the influence of the Gospel for months and years, the children grow up uneducated, and the people gradually become averse to regular or hard work. People even run the risk of losing the Bible and family devotions completely. Because, as someone told us, if one has to trek before daybreak in order to escape the heat, and if in the evening the wind blows out the candles in the wagon tent, soon there is no question of Bible study.[148]
Malan’s disapproval dripped from every letter. It is clear that he regarded any spiritual labour among these people as an attempt to plug a leaking dyke. He believed that they ought not to be there in the first place, and already belonged to the class of poor whites. Malan was gravely concerned about poor whiteism, which he believed had a direct impact on the Afrikaners’ God-given calling – as well as their continued existence. It had the potential to disturb the precariously balanced racial hierarchy.
Malan regarded poor whiteism not so much as a poverty of flesh than as a poverty of spirit and mind, when all sense of adulthood and even self-respect had been lost. The only remedy, as far as he was concerned, was to rebuild the character of poor whites.[149] It formed a crucial driving force behind his preoccupation with language rights, as he constantly made it clear that language was directly related to national self-respect, and self-respect, in turn, was directly responsible for character.
The white poverty that he encountered in the two Rhodesias was different. Malan dubbed it ‘pioneer’s poverty’. It was a temporary situation, caused by disasters such as the rinderpest or East Coast Fever, which depleted cattle stocks, or the trial and error that accompanies the establishment of a new settlement. Pioneer’s poverty did, however, pose the danger of converting to poor whiteism, as the above-mentioned disasters prompted people to take up the nomadic lifestyle of transport riding or, even worse, hunting, as a temporary remedy to their difficult situation. If the temporary remedy became a permanent one, family life – with its tender and elevating influence – became lost, one’s sense of responsibility was weakened, children received no education – or if they did, merely a smattering – and moreover, people lost the habit of working hard and regularly on a daily basis. When transport riding no longer offered a living, or when all the game had been shot, they found themselves unfit for anything else. ‘There is no doubt that the poor white problem was born in the back tent of the transport wagon, and mostly behind the butt end of a Mauser,’ Malan declared.[150]
It was essential to solve the poor white problem in order to fend off the ‘Swart Gevaar’ (Black Peril). Malan believed that those whites who tried to ward off the advancement of Africans by denying them the right to vote, or by denying them access to education, failed to grasp the essence of the problem. The racial balance was based on Europeans’ inherent superiority and Africans’ inherent respect for them. As long as Europeans acted in a manner that was worthy of that respect, African advancement, which was a natural process, did not have to be feared, as whites’ inherent superiority would always assure them an elevated position. But if this respect was destroyed by the appalling behaviour of poor whites, withholding education and political and social rights could not save the white race from what was to come:
The violent exclusion of civil rights, which even the most unworthy white may enjoy, will in this case make the eventual revolution only more inevitable and bring it about more rapidly, with the outcome even more ill-fated. If, through his behaviour, the white loses the respect of the native, it means, in any case for South Africa – the Deluge. For this reason alone, if for no other, the South African nation ought to have the highest spiritual and moral standing and be the most civilised nation in the world. From this point of view, the solution of the poor white issue is also the solution to the native issue.[151]
Malan implored his readers to shift their focus. Instead of feeling threatened by Africans, they had to feel threatened by the degradation of their fellow whites:
The Black Peril would not exist if it were not for a White Peril that is a hundred times greater, which undermines and destroys the black’s respect for the white race. That the Kaffir [sic] is wicked, is in the first instance not the Kaffirs’ [sic] fault, it is not in the least the fault of mission work, it is the fault of the many whites who live worse than Kaffirs [sic].[152]
In his travel diary, Malan pleaded incessantly for the Dutch Reformed Church to expand its work in Rhodesia and to build Dutch-language schools. There was, however, also a new, and crucial, turn in his thoughts. He had grown up in a political home, devoured newspapers since his student years, written reams and reams of political opinions to his family and friends, and made rousing speeches on the most politicised issue of his day – the language movement. Politics was like oxygen to him and yet, under Valeton’s influence, he had pushed it away and dismissed it as impure. While he was in Rhodesia, however, it became more apparent to him than ever that policy decisions made at government level determined the nature of society. National upliftment could only be truly successful if the government supported the issues that were close to the nation’s heart, such as the education of its children in the language and faith of its national church. The church could only be successful in its task if the very highest echelons of the state were infused with its ideals. For the first time, Malan began to envision a place for religion in politics:
With reference to the increasing secularisation of our nation … the time might come when there will be an independent Christian-national party in our Parliament that can give a guarantee to the nation that its holiest principles will under no circumstances be turned into tradable commodities.[153]
This vision was closer than he realised. It was still a few months before Hertzog’s dismissal from the Botha cabinet, and more than a year before the National Party would be founded – but deep in the back of Malan’s mind, a door that had been shut for many years began to open.
The last stop on Malan’s journey was a visit to Morgenster, the mission station where his sister had lived and worked since her marriage. One of the missionaries, Maria van Coller, recorded her impression of Malan in her diary: ‘Despite outward appearances, Dr Malan is cheerful, sympathetic (very). Can laugh heartily, reason heartily, especially with women.’[154]
Here, Malan also met mission-educated Africans. The experience strengthened his views on the racial hierarchy and his arguments about white poverty. There were many whites who complained that missionaries who educated Africans stirred up racial tensions, as educated Africans had no respect for whites. For this reason, they were opposed to Africans receiving any education whatsoever. Malan tried to make it clear to them that it was impossible to halt African education – it was inevitable that Africans would strive to elevate themselves:
But even if, for the sake of the majority of the
